PROFESSOR OWEN ON THE GENUS DINORNIS. 373 



Gould', of its affinity to the ColumbidcE, was supported by new arguments adduced 

 by Mr. Strickland in his elaborate and interesting communications and lecture before 

 the British Association at Oxford (June 1847), and will doubtless be further eluci- 

 dated in the forthcoming work on the extinct flightless birds of the Mauritius and 

 neighbouring Isles, which Mr. Strickland is about to publish in conjunction with Dr. 

 Melville. It need cause no surprise, since there are strictly aquatic and marine forms 

 of birds deprived, by a low development and special modification of the wings, of the 

 power of flight, if we should detect in other natural groups of birds aberrant forms 

 similarly debarred from what seems to be the characteristic field of locomotion of 

 their class, to range which aery region by power of flight would seem to have been the 

 special aim and end of all the remarkable modifications of structure by which Birds are 

 distinguished from the other classes of vertebrate animals, I know not a more perplex- 

 ing or suggestive problem in the series of seeming anomalies of Natural History than a 

 bird that cannot fly. 



Of what known natural group or family of birds the Dinornis with its adze-like beak 

 and crocodilian cranium is an apterous modification, I am not at present enabled to 

 express a decided opinion. The closer conformation of the pelvis of the Dinornis to 

 that of the Bustard than to those of the true Struthionida;, is pointed out in my Memoir 

 of 1843' ; and I may now add, tiiat the Bustard— by the extension of the bony ridges 

 from the paroccipital to the basisphenoid, by the ridge of the basisphenoid underhang- 

 ing the notch of the eustachian outlets, by the presence of a tympanic process as well 

 as a true mastoid process from the mastoid bone, by the division of the articular surface 

 for the tympanic bone into two distinct cups, by the extent of the tympanic excava- 

 tion behind these, and by the backward extension of the nasals and nasal process of the 

 maxillary above the expanded upper plate of the coalesced prefrontals,— approaches 

 nearer the Dinornis than does the Apteryx or any of the larger existing struthious birds. 

 The Bustards, like the Dinornis, want the hind-toe. Were the large sternum described 

 in my Memoir of 1846^ certainly proved to belong to the genus Dinornis; as now re- 

 stricted, it would, from its resemblance to that of the Apteryx, incline the scale of judg- 

 ment towards its natural affinity to that genus and to the true Struthionida; ; but since 

 the remains of the Palapteryx ingens, as well as those of Dinornis gigas, were discovered 

 in the same turbary deposits, the sternum in question may with equal probability on 

 that score, and now with more reason, from the discovery of a true struthious form of 

 cranium among the remains of the great birds in New Zealand, be referred to the 

 genus Palapteryx, represented by the bones of the extremities described in the former 



' Birds of Australia, Part XXII. Description of the Gnathodon strigirostris : the bird, wliich its discoverer, 

 Mr. Titian Peale, supposed to be allied to the Dodo, and proposed to name Didunculus, which was first described 

 by Sir William Jardine under the name of Gnathodon strigirostris, and which Mr. Gould regards as being most 

 nearly allied to the family of Pigeons, Cotumbidcs. 



' Zool. Trans, iii. pp. ■^55, 257. Zool. Trans, iii.p. 316. 



